How Do I Hide My Position?

Stay in control of when Xopoz records and shares your location — and how to stop the phone itself from being trackable by any app

Short Answer

You have three independent levers, in increasing order of strength:

Inside Xopoz, choose what to record and what to share. Two separate switches let you record locally without sharing, or share without storing locally, in any combination.
Switch Xopoz off. One tap on the top-right power button stops recording instantly. The phone vibrates a distinctive short — short — long pattern as a physical confirmation that the service has stopped.
Block the phone itself from estimating any position — the cross-app recipe useful even if you do not use Xopoz: turn off Location Services and enable airplane mode. This works against every app on the phone.

Before You Read Further: The One Rule That Makes the Rest True

Xopoz never sends your position to the server unless you have joined a team and explicitly consented to share with that team. No team membership means no position upload — this is enforced at the database layer on the server, not just in the app: a position row that does not match an existing team membership is rejected by the database engine before it can be stored. There is no code path that sends positions for a device that belongs to no team.

Joining a team is itself a deliberate, two-condition action:

A valid team ticket (the QR or text code shared by an existing team member).
An explicit tick on the consent checkbox "I accept to share my position with team members", with the date of consent recorded for audit. The Join button stays disabled until both conditions are met — you cannot accidentally join, and you cannot join without consenting.

Because of this, a Xopoz user always knows exactly when their position is being shared: it happens only after they have joined a team, and only with the members of that team. The privacy switches and the power button described below let you tighten things further, but the baseline is already that nothing leaves the device by default.

Layer 1: Xopoz Privacy Switches

Switching Xopoz off is the bluntest tool. Before reaching for it, two more granular switches let you decide separately what gets stored on your phone and what gets sent to your team.

The Two Independent Privacy Permissions

Local Save Permission — controls whether your GPS positions are stored in the device's local trail. With this off, no personal history is kept on the phone.
Push Location Permission — controls whether your position is transmitted to your team. With this off, you appear offline to teammates even though Xopoz is running.

The two switches are independent — they can be set in any combination. Changes take effect immediately without restarting the app.

Four Privacy Modes

Local Save	Push to Team	What Happens	When You Want This
On	On	Full tracking: local history kept, team sees you live.	Standard team coordination.
On	Off	Private tracking: you see your own trail, team sees you offline.	Personal navigation, time off, lunch break.
Off	On	Team-only mode: no local history kept, team sees you live.	Shared phones; minimal local footprint.
Off	Off	Silent: nothing stored, nothing shared. Xopoz still runs but produces no position data anywhere.	Maximum in-app privacy short of switching off.

Layer 2: Optional Intraday Tracking Window

If you only want Xopoz to record during certain hours (typical for work/non-work separation), you can set an intraday window with a start time and an end time. Outside the window, Xopoz remains running but suspends recording automatically.

How Intraday Tracking Behaves

Default: no intraday window. Out of the box, Xopoz records continuously whenever it is running. You opt in.
Hour range: any start and stop hour between 1 AM and 11 PM. Each switch is independent — you can set start-only, end-only, or both.
Same-day only: the start hour must be before the stop hour. Overnight ranges (e.g. 22:00–06:00) are not supported and trigger a red validation error in settings.
Visual feedback: when tracking is currently blocked by the schedule, the map status row shows a red Intraday blocked indicator next to the GPS status pill.
Resume is event-driven, not timer-driven. When the start time arrives, tracking resumes via the next natural phone event — screen wake, motion detection, or device activity. There is no background timer waking the phone for you, which preserves battery.
Xopoz must still be started. Intraday is a window within a running session; it is not a magic auto-start. If Xopoz is switched off, no recording happens during the window either.

Layer 3: Switch Xopoz Off

The power button lives at the top-right corner of the Xopoz main screen. One tap stops the recording service and tears down the GPS subscription. Recording resumes only when you explicitly press start again.

Vibration Confirmation: "short — short — long"

When you press the power button, the phone vibrates a distinctive short — short — long pattern. This is the physical acknowledgement that Xopoz has switched off. It is felt, not seen: you do not need to keep your eyes on the screen to know it worked. If you do not feel it, the app did not stop — press again and feel for the confirmation.

What About Positions You Already Pushed?

Switching off prevents future recording and sharing. Positions you already pushed to a team remain on the server until they expire under your retention policy (1–30 days, user-configurable). Note however that those positions are encrypted on the device with a team key that the server does not hold — the server stores opaque ciphertext. A server breach reveals nothing usable. When you leave a team or delete the position history, the data is removed from the server and the local files are overwritten with 0xFF before being unlinked.

Layer 4: Stop the Phone Itself From Being Trackable

Switching Xopoz off stops Xopoz from recording. It does nothing about the rest of the apps on your phone, and nothing about Android's own location services. If you want a hard guarantee that no app, no system service, and no background process is estimating your position at all, the lever is at the operating-system level. This recipe works regardless of whether you use Xopoz.

How Modern Phones Determine Position

Before the recipe, a quick engineering primer. A smartphone can compute its position from three independent classes of signal:

Signal Source	How It Works	What Disables It
GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou)	Passive radio receiver decoding microwave timing signals from satellites. The phone listens; it does not transmit. Accuracy: 3–10 m outdoors.	Disabling Location Services in the OS (gates the receiver to apps). On most Androids, airplane mode alone does not shut down the GNSS chip because it has no transmitter.
Cellular tower triangulation	The cellular modem talks to nearby base stations; the OS or carrier estimates your position from signal strength + tower locations. Accuracy: 50 m to several km, depending on density.	Airplane mode (turns the cellular radio off entirely).
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning	The phone passively scans for nearby Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth beacons; their MAC addresses map to known geographic locations via crowdsourced databases (Google's WPS, Apple's database, Mozilla Location Service). Accuracy: 10–50 m indoors.	Turning Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off (airplane mode disables both, but Android allows you to re-enable them inside airplane mode — if you do, this channel is back on).

The Two-Step Recipe

Disable All Three Channels At Once

Disable Location Services. Pull down the quick-settings shade and turn off the "Location" tile (or Settings → Location → Use location: off). This revokes location access for every app and gates the GNSS receiver, regardless of whether the GPS chip is physically running.
Enable airplane mode. This shuts down the cellular radio and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios in one move — killing both the cellular-triangulation channel and the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth scanning channel.
Leave Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off inside airplane mode. Android lets you re-enable them while still in airplane mode. If you do, the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth scanning channel comes back. Keep them off for the duration.

With both Location Services off and airplane mode on (and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth left off), there is no signal source from which any app or system service on the phone can derive a position estimate. This blocks both real-time tracking (an app querying your current position) and delayed tracking (an app silently caching readings to upload later when connectivity returns) — because there are no readings to cache in the first place.

How Reliable Is This?

For the practical threat model of "an app on my phone tracking me", this recipe is effectively complete. Apps depend on the OS for location, and the OS has nothing to give them when both Location Services and the radios are off. There is no app-accessible side channel.

Strictly speaking, however, it is not 100 % in every conceivable threat model. Here are the residual edges, in order of how realistic they are:

Edge Cases Worth Knowing

Motion sensors keep working. The accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer are never disabled by airplane mode or by Location Services. With a known starting point, an app can do dead reckoning — estimating relative motion from sensor readings. In practice this drifts within seconds and is useless for surveillance, but it is technically a position signal.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth probe leakage if you re-enable them. Even without an internet connection, if Wi-Fi is on, the phone broadcasts probe requests that include hardware identifiers. Passive scanners (the kind retailers use to count footfall) can log these. Modern Android randomizes the MAC address per network, which limits this, but the channel exists.
OEM-specific overrides. Some manufacturers (Samsung "Find My Mobile", Xiaomi, Huawei) run their own services that may keep certain radios alive even in airplane mode for "lost device" features. Behaviour varies; check the OEM's settings if your threat model requires it.
Emergency calling bypasses airplane mode. Dialling the emergency number reactivates the cellular radio and transmits location to dispatch. This is a regulatory feature, not a leak — relevant only to know that one specific user action overrides the lockdown.
Baseband modem attacks. The cellular modem firmware is a closed-source separate processor, in theory remotely attackable to switch the radio back on. Of academic interest only outside nation-state threat models.

If your threat model includes any of these, the only strictly 100 % answer is to power the phone off entirely — and for the truly extreme, remove the SIM and store the device in a Faraday pouch.

What This Recipe Does Not Cover

The recipe blocks future position acquisition. It does not retroactively delete what apps have already stored. If an app captured your location ten minutes ago and is waiting for connectivity to upload it, the upload will happen the moment you leave airplane mode. To deal with already-recorded data, you have to use each app's own data-deletion controls (in Xopoz: leave the team, delete device history, or uninstall). Photos taken before disabling location still carry GPS coordinates in their EXIF metadata. None of this is changed by the airplane-mode recipe.